Various types of food cutting apparatus are known in the prior art. For example, so-called high-performance slicers are used to slice food products such as sausage, meat or cheese at a high cutting speed. A single cutting apparatus—having a correspondingly large blade—can be utilized by the principle of the multi-track feeding for the simultaneous cutting of a plurality of product loaves or product bars—hereinafter simply: products—in order thus to further increase the cutting performance.
The cut-off product slices are usually combined to portions—for example in stack form or in overlapping form—and are subsequently fed to further processing apparatus such as to a packaging machine. Since the portions have to have a predefined weight and/or a predefined number of slices, it is possible that only an incomplete part portion can be sliced at the end of a product. Since the further processing of incomplete portions should be avoided, but, on the other hand, discarding the product slices is unwanted, in particular with high-quality products, there is a need to complete incomplete part portions. This can generally be done in that incomplete part portions arising at the product end are completed after provision of a new product by product slices of the following product. There is, however, the problem in this respect that, on a product change, first a non-usable end piece of the already sliced product and subsequently a likewise unusable first cut of the new product have to be removed. The incomplete part portion therefore first has to be conveyed away from the effective region of the cutting blade (e.g. on a portioning conveyor) and subsequently be fed back to the effective region. With a multi-track slicing, this requires individually adjustable portioning conveyors for the individual tracks since the products on the individual tracks normally do not come to an end exactly simultaneously. The provision of individually controllable portioning conveyors is, however, complex and expensive since such portioning conveyors usually need to have additional functions. Portion conveyors are designed to be pivotable to the side or downwardly lowerable.